Category: Writing

Give me five, give me ten

Give me Five
Give me Ten
Give me round the bend again
you will know when I roll
through your town
Give me Five
Give me Ten
Give me round the bend again
as I impart the wisdom that I’ve found

You may stray
o so far away
you may go where only god can follow
But your mind will find
a thousand ways to shine
and your heart may ache and never yet
be hollow

Chorus

You may settle down
in some quiet town
You may mind your business and your manners
But life itself will not stay on any shelf
and it kicks aside whatever’s in your planner

chorus

Will you lift your wings and fly
into a strange new sky
Is every minute made for thought and caution
If you stay behind will you get to change your mind
or get hung out to dry just like your washin

Chorus

You may wait … for an important date
And find that life has gone by in the meantime
But it’s one short breath between your birth and death
so you might as well enjoy yourself between time

Chorus x 2

Every age holds its terrors

At 56, I do not wish to be fooled.  So when I see something on the internet about how if you type in

“Im 9 should I”

and then increment up by one year until you hit forty, you get this.

I thought, you know that is just bullshit.  I bet I get different results.  Well, not by much.  It’s a horrific indictment of our culture, our family structures, our septic and moth-eaten education, and the din of heteronormativity.

Herewith, the Allegra Sloman Google search poem entitled I’m x should I.

I’m 9 should I wear a bra

I’m 10 should I date

I’m 11 should I finger myself

I’m 12 should I finger my girlfriend

I’m 13 should I finger myself

I’m 14 should I shave

I’m 15 should I lift weights

I’m 16 should I finger myself (Ed. back to that again I see)

I’m 17 should I buy M Rated games

I’m 18 should I get a credit card

I’m 19 should I move out

I’m 20 should I get life insurance

I’m 21 should I move out

I’m 22 should I move out

I’m 23 should I move out

I’m 24 should I join the military

I’m 25 should I go to college

I’m 26 should I go back to school

I’m 27 should I join the military

I’m 28 should I have a baby

I’m 29 should I work out

I’m 30 should I work out

I’m 31 should I have a baby

I’m 32 should I have a baby

I’m 33 should I freeze my eggs

I’m 34 should I have a baby

I’m 35 should I have a baby

I’m 36 should I shave my pubes

I’m 37 should I have a baby

I’m 38 should I have a baby

I’m 39 should I have a baby

I’m 40 should I have a baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Northern Hemisphere gets weather

It’s precipitating like, very hard, man, in a variety of places, including, according to my correspondents, England.  Israel and Norway are also getting pounded.

This showed up in my feed this morning courtesy of Ian Michael Walden

To quote the Two Ronnies – “It’ll be choking ’em in Wokingham, killing ’em in Gillingham, and if you live in Lissingdown, take an umbrella”.

YOINK.

Paul asked for additional support for the Yes, It Continues unpacking yesterday.  We also noodled around for a while (quite a while in my case) on musical instruments and vacuumed and swept various surfaces in prep for the party on Sunday…. and Paul made pork stir fry with yellow curry sauce and quinoa and greek salad om nom nom, while I collected Keith from work. Ayesha is a TUB but so affectionate and sweet.

The downstairs neighbours are appropriately chastened that Buster wuz not a grrl.

It would be nice to have a job.  This week I started pulling all my lyrics into one place; I know I’ve written a lot of songs. I’ve gotten better at it as I get older.  The novel sits glaring at me.

Sandy’s pipes are frozen.  My travails, in many respects, are small.

Written for Conflikt

Blow you winter winds
blow where you please
hang your icy bunting
on the barren trees
decorate the windows
with capricious lace
send your storm clouds flying
cross the lunar face

Dandelions dreaming
underneath their banks of snow
Soon they will be blooming
Soon enough the seeds will blow

Blow you winter winds
gales and chills
howl around the hollows
echo through the hills
Bringing snow and fog
bringing ice and rain
A moment of the sun
then all is dark again.

Blow you winter winds
blow where you will
Now my spirit feels
oh so small and still
Soon we’ll close the door
on your bleak refrain
For we will rejoice
and we will sing again

Blow you winter winds
mark my skin
Soon I will be warm
with my loves and kin
Two foot and four foot
All will be within
There’s a roaring fire
at the Dandelion Inn

Dandelions dreaming
underneath their banks of snow
Soon they will be blooming
and soon enough the seeds will blow

It isn’t a poem

b ut it’s mine, and it’s mildly amusing

A poem, condensed from my Tweets over the last year

Bizarre bromance

by GrandmaOgre <---- my twitter handle Than a lesbian think I'm a bigot. Way through to spare your feelings. We do what we can with what we got. Shit. Fortunate dudebro! Blessings! Against the NFL. Prepping popcorn. And call it the whole beast. When the blind pig finds an acorn? It needs to be widely broadcast. Go Jodie! Leave the perfect to the critics. Valve. Some traditions need to die. I have ever used it works fine. Had no idea what they were called. "God wills it!" & "I got Mine"

Response to Björk interview

oh what is written on this page
and how connected to this other
the words are most important
not the glue that holds the book together

perhaps in this light you can see
what seems to be invisible
pushing against the limits of sight
and derision

How could that glue be more important than the book
when the pages have now come loose and rebuke
all order
she was glue
she was invisible glue

and now the book she held together is gone

you mourn the missing words
and speak of Herculaneum
and when the scrolls were put aside
until some scientist could peer into them
and see how the ink stood out from the ashen pages

perhaps one day you will see me as I am
invisible glue
and in the meantime
you will celebrate
nothing but what I hold together

The Clutter song

Thanks to Chris O’Shea for starting that group on facebook!

When your hoarding is quite utter
And your spouse begins to sputter
Junk away, junk away
It’s time to clear the clutter

A foolish decorative stutter:
Empty jars of peanut butter
Junk away, junk away
It’s time to clear the clutter

Out, the spavined paper cutter
How your heart is set aflutter
Junk away, junk away
It’s time to clear the clutter

Pull your heart out of the gutter
Find a home for that old putter
Junk away, junk away
It’s time to clear the clutter

You will grumble, whine and mutter
You were going to find half a day and do something about that decorative shutter
Junk away, junk away
It’s time to clear the clutter.

Moar coffee

I got a perfectly good nights’ sleep but I feel very sludgy today.

On the list of things to do:  Mail package to Sandy.  Buy butter.  Make a list of the stuff I have to get  for the Feast of St. Brigid – we’re having a musical evening at Planet Bachelor on February 1st and I’m cooking (and likely cleaning, if trends hold). Practice songs and assemble song books for that event. Moar editing – I’m doing a little every day, which is happy making.  Hopefully it will result in fewer “What the hell is this??” notes from Dianne. Make some phone calls.  Go for a walk – I am thinking of walking up to the library. Watch the Librarians double episode season closer. Put away my clothes, including my COAT which Buster PISSED ON.  Argh.  Sally told me yesterday that once male cats get that habit you’ll be dealing with it forever, but we can has UV lights for piss detection and we shall enzyme clean and Feliway everything in the house if we have to.  Right now it’s REDOLENT up in here. Take a metric crapstack of painkillers and clean. Figure out how to get the mirror off the wall in the bathroom so I can get it resilvered, I am tired of looking like a zombie in my own bathroom mirror.  Fix my website. Get more crap to Value Village. Make a square blankee for Alex.

Jeff is really liking Z Nation – it’s not a soap opera with occasional zombies like Walking Dead, it’s all zombies, all the time, with occasional stops for breath.  He sometimes comes upstairs and tells me of the new and improved zombie killing methods the show comes up with, like squishing them with the Liberty Bell, which you have to admit is hilarious.  Also it’s shot in the Pacific NW so props.

Seahawks did the ultimate haw haw you thought being two td’s ahead was going to stop us to the Packers yesterday.  The fans screamed themselves hoarse.

I forgot to say how VERY HAPPY I was to see Ivy back at church yesterday.  I love that woman and I’m glad to see she’s recovering well from her busted hip.

 

 

Church today

I am wearing my pink dress and my tie dyed tights today; I won’t be easy to miss.

Buster peed on one my mOm’s quilts which is very annoying but Jeff popped it in the laundry for me.

I am continuing with the decluttering.  Yesterday it was all my bookmarks on my computer.

I edited three sections totalling over 15K words today and yesterday.  I will go back and edit them again, tightening, deleting, expanding, and upgrading the punctuation.

Mist in my vision

The Drop, James Gandolfini’s last performance, was wonderful, a neatly crafted, beautifully shot gangster movie.  Tom Hardy veers between lyrical romance and brute physical menace with such restraint that he can use virtually the same expressions to convey them both.  Noomi Rapace is not quite wasted as the utility grade girlfriend, and my ranting pants are at the dry cleaners so I’ll skip to the next part… it had a good score.

Enjoyed Knights of Badassdom, although the overarching conceit of the movie is that if a woman wants to be a meretricious poser and dump the insanely hot Ryan Kwanten that means she should be transformed into a succubus, tortured and summarily killed while Summer Glau looks fondly on. Boys, take your relationship problems a little further downwind before you next write a script.  Bechdel test oh come on now Allegra you’re being oversensitive.  No, I’m not, and neither do I need to belabour the point.

I LOVED PRIDE.  It was a lovely, cheerful, excruciatingly funny, tear-jerking, heartbreaking YA MY PEOPLE movie, and I wouldn’t change a thing about any of the performances.  The music was so good all I can say is anybody in their twenties when this music was the bee’s knees will think they died and woke up listening to CFNY.

Sue upped and back from church one congregant viz me, plus she brought cookies so bonus hit points for her.  I hope to feast her for her birthday. I love my little church. Marilyn’s been laid low with a cold for two weeks and only just struggled back to civilization, so taking on leading the service was much appreciated given her challenges.

Briefly saw Brooke and her Beancat, whose grasp of rhetorical artifice firms apace, and in whom I see alarming signs of possibly becoming an insanely highpriced lawyer.  Dood be smart.

Back to the grind of a mere 2000 words.  A bagatelle, if you can’t see the anchor tied to my ass!

The title of this post is taken from today’s homily, and is about a beautiful moment, not a sad one.

Sleepovers and trash

Keith and Paul and Mike dropped by last night for pizza, movies and conversation, and it was wonderful to see them all.

I’ve done a lot of things wrong in my life, but picking my friends hasn’t been one of them.

Keith slept over – I put a bunch of Woly shoe creme on his work shoes, which are so trashed by salt water that the leather is starting to come apart in layers. There must be six bucks worth of it on there… I hadn’t even opened it and I’ve had it three years, so I’m glad to be using a resource.

One of my fave Beaconites, Dina Davidson, local midwife extraordinaire, got some press time on her favourite subject.

Katie cut her dad’s hair yesterday.  Given that she and Paul hadn’t spoken in the best part of a month – immediately after the birth of the first grandchild – I will leave you to parse that as best you may.

I am doing coffee at church tomorrow.  I think I’ll make a cake, but make something else to leave here so Jeff doesn’t come looking all expectant with no treats.  So I have to remember to immediately put on bread dough the instant I get up tomorrow, because if I do it today, it will be gone tomorrow. Treat Logistics.

I am learning to my horror that the second section of the book is in disarray, and the timelines are all squidded up, and I appear to have TWICE written the same scene twice without incorporating the necessary elements from the other draft.  It’s ugly and I’m frustrated.  I think I’m going to need another writing week without the siren song of Agents of SHIELD to fix this mess (although we are close to the end LOL) so I’ll be checking in with the mOmster to see when would or might be convenient.  Won’t be until after my homily January 4 though.

Autumn, who may really be Peaches, loves Agent Coulson.  She sits on the back of the sofa and gazes at him adoringly.

I have laundry.  I’m doing it, I’m not digging it.  I have to ditch a whole bunch of my clothes because they are not meeting my needs, but that in itself makes me sad.  I should just take a picture and move on.

I’m also hoping to walk over to 6th and do a mini shop.

We’ll see what happens when Keith gets up… he may want a late brekkie.  I can definitely help out with the coffee.

There’s been an update to wordpress, the engine that runs this blog, and it allows me to have an empty screen when I’m typing, which is actually kind of cool and gives you a nice electronic typewriter feeling.

Just so you know

I don’t appreciate having ads for Kinder Morgan on my site, and am trying to figure out how to get rid of them.

Check it out!  Isn’t it great when men who will have access to date rape drugs make fun about date rape?

A friend is having trouble with a band council administration.  Colonialism has made a proper mess of First Nations life.  This story has alcohol, violence and threats of it, substandard housing, employment being contingent on who your cousins are, more alcohol, treatment centers that drive their their residents in to town to buy cigarettes (fuck you must be kidding), people walking into your house in the middle of the night and not leaving when asked, being fired for no cause when you’re doing your job properly, having to call the RCMP on your in laws, racism and more bullshit than could be shoveled in a month by ten strong men.

If I hadn’t heard from a dear friend today, who is doing fine, I’d be very much on edge.d

Back to my babies.  Literary, squidly babies, with large appetites.

My take on Hitchens

That which can be asserted without evidence should be ignored without distress.  And no, I don’t apologize to dead men.

I’m having a much harder time assembling part II than part I since I don’t seem to have as many connecting links between the pieces.

My friend Catherine was on the telly last night talking about her role in rescuing 60 cats.  Despite her allergies she is fostering two immense, extremely affectionate rescue cats, Riopelle and Smokey. Complaints about their point loading have already been registered.

We are enjoying Agents of Shield while ignoring plot holes, bad acting and the comic book world’s lack of sophistication with respect to air frame physics.

Haunting

I find this haunting. Someone has tried to reconstruct Babylonian song.

Yesterday I saw Sue in Little Women the Musical.  Unfortunately the book was not as good as the actors and musicians.  Fortunately I was able to argue my points with the actors afterwards without being dishonest or unkind, and it widened into a broader discussion of the challenges and rewards of musical theatre.  Ten years ago I would have said, Oh it was great, it was great.  Now I have the brains to respect people enough to be honest and the social intelligence to be honest without being a cad.

It was in Granville Island.  I had half an hour to Christmas shop.  I got an Alexosaurus (stuffed T Rex) and a kazoo.  Strangely, that is what I wanted.  I have rarely had a briefer and more pleasant Christmas shop.  The weather was crisply glorious and I likely won’t get to Granville Island again until Tammy comes.

Jeff and I walked to IHOP and back for breakfast.  It was very pleasant.

I think Riddle Number II is a cloud.  What do you think?

Work on the trilogy continues. Kima is pregnant – with more than 100 zygotes  by three fathers of two different morphs. This presents any number of social, emotional, physiological and ‘race’ issues.

I had a pleasant recent conversation with Dave JD.  He has joined the ranks of the unemployed.  I tried to get Facetime to reduce the expense of talking to him and repeated and lengthy attempts to purchase it were fruitless.  I really loathe anything to do with Apple customer service.  When I want an Android app or book I press a button, and free or not, it appears on my phone in about five minutes.  (I’m still on the first chapter of the Piketty book -if anyone wants to mock me… go ahead).

I can’t really deal with heeled shoes any more so I took two pairs of Fluevogs into church yesterday (the bus DIDN’T COME at 10:03, or even five minutes earlier according to the guy I ran into so I was 25 minutes late for church, screw you translink).  Anyway the teenaged co-congregant who had admired my steampunky shoes got about 300 dollars worth of footgear in a little bag, and if I did nothing else yesterday I made her very happy.  Her socks MATCHED the second pair of shoes, in a most gratifying way.

How do you detect an extrasolar planet? With objects found in hardware stores and Nikon lenses and software and a little something something to remove blur.

Yesterday morning I awoke to a dream in which Hitler’s mustache was crawling up my door frame.  I woke up for real and spent a disoriented couple of seconds looking for it.  Very odd, and not a little disturbing.

Breakfast of writing champions! Peanut butter cookies warm from the oven and fair trade coffee with real cream.  Ha!

We think Autumn may be knocked up.  It’s always something.

wooooo hooooo!

I just wrote 2461 words on Kima…. and I had fun and whacked out all the unnecessary verbiage as I went.

I have now set up an entire subplot for the next book in the trilogy, one that has implications for George and Kima’s friendship, ethics regarding experimentation on sentient creatures, ELF broadcast technology (Kima figures out how to miniaturize it to the point of packing it into a Sixer body which would be required anyway because an ELF transmitter normally has to be massive) and will be the catalyst for the world coming together in a way that has not been seen since the moon landing, and almost triggers world war III.  In order for me to carry off this dance of technobabble, I will now have to learn more than I want to about ocean currents, maps of magnetic force around and through the Earth, and what a Sixer would have to do to get an entire sheet of bioluminescent plankton to make a pattern visible from space… as a prank.

 

did i say i was having fun??!!